Category: STEM Models & Simulations
The WATERS (Watershed Awareness using Technology and Environmental Research for Sustainability) project recently ended with a Master Teacher Workshop at our Concord office for selected teachers who participated in the National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded research with excellence and enthusiasm. The goal of the workshop was to exchange best practices for teaching the now freely available, […]
Last summer, thick plumes of wildfire smoke from northern Canada blanketed cities as far south as Washington, D.C., in an eerie orange haze. Record-breaking wildfires in provinces across Canada resulted in catastrophic damage to homes and communities, the destruction of more than 45.7 million acres of forest, and dangerously unhealthy air quality throughout the Northeast […]
Social media has been exploding with New Year’s resolutions since early fall. If you’d like to get a head start on your own educational resolutions for the next calendar year, we’ve got you covered. Want to help students see Earth science as a lab science? Add more data science activities to your high school classes? […]
From local environmental justice issues to global phenomena such as climate change, complex problems often require systems thinking to address them. Since 2018, the National Science Foundation-funded Multilevel Computational Modeling project, a collaboration between the Concord Consortium and the CREATE for STEM Institute at Michigan State University, has researched how the use of our SageModeler […]
Stephanie Seevers is an Earth science teacher in Colorado and a consultant on the TecRocks project. I was talking to my 9th grade Earth and Space Science students recently about why they think so many people lack a solid understanding of our planet and its history. We brainstormed ideas, and while several theories sounded valid, […]
Across the Earth, rock is being created, destroyed, and transformed all the time. If you were to witness a volcanic eruption up close, you would see the birth of new rock. While such an eruption results in a dramatic display of Earth’s power, many rock-forming processes are invisible as they take place deep beneath Earth’s […]
Ambitious Science Teaching now includes a focus on equity and reaching diverse student populations. One principle of the Critical and Cultural Approaches to Ambitious Science Teaching (C2-AST) framework (Thompson et al., 2021) is to situate learning around phenomena that prioritizes students’ communities and cultures, their local environment, and daily experience. While this can be a […]
While our main offices are located in Concord, Massachusetts, and El Cerrito, California, nine of our 45 employees call other states home. Like many companies, we began working remotely during the pandemic and most of us continue to do so much of the time. But as an organization dedicated to innovating and inspiring equitable, large-scale […]
Teachers have used our interactive online activities for many years with great success. However, the same request has come up time and time again: “Is there any way that students can have the page read out loud?” Until recently, this could only be done with browser plug-ins that were complicated to install on students’ computers […]
The authors of the 1972 book entitled The Limits to Growth set out to answer a critically important question. Can Earth sustain a human population that pursues a goal of continual economic growth? Based on a computer model they created, their answer was both guarded and cautionary: “If the present growth trends in world population, […]